Let's welcome the stress test

[teukon]

"Necessity is the mother of invention" as they say.

Bitcoin is still in its experimental phase.  Even the reference client states "This is experimental software." in its About window.  The waters can be rough at times and nothing is certain.  Those critically reliant on Bitcoin's smooth operation only have themselves to blame for their overexposure.

[mallard]

The problem is the system that can't handle them.

But the network carried on working during the spam attacks.

[tonycamp]

as a monetary good into digital mode the miners mine and trade the buyers do the relevance to dollars and euro and yen and the dong but the world its not prepared for bitcoin into a good digital way of fast decentralized currency in order to fight governments from left or right wing who know hows gonna pick this coin the left wing did into terror a bit that's make us nervous and stressed lol

[johnyj]

That's good, just like the bank stress test, some of the banks will fail the test and have to improve their liquidity, if we could periodically have this kind of test, then we can have a good estimate of each node's capability in case a sudden surge in transaction volume hit (non-spaming, during price rally or crash)

Don't compare a bank stress test with the current Bitcoin stress test.
During a bank stress test the customers of the bank will not notice any difference in their interaction with the bank. They don't pay more tx fees, they don't find longer queues in cashiers or ATMs. They don't even know that the bank is under an ongoing stress test. And finally the definition of bank stress test is: "An analysis or simulation designed to determine the ability of a given financial instrument or financial institution to deal with an economic crisis". The key words are analysis or simulation, not destructive activities that can block bank customers to interact with their accounts.
The current Bitcoin stress test is not an analysis or simulation using the testnet as it ought to be and finally will not produce any new results that we don't know yet.

My bank's mobile payment system constantly crashes (at least twice this month) for hours and they only "apologize for the inconvenience" on their website and customer support. So we definitely know the bank's system technically is unstable from time to time, but who cares, as soon as it back online, everyone happily trading again.

But bitcoin holds much more stability than banks, even during the stress test, you can pay enough fee and make sure your transactions will be confirmed in time. It never stops working. However the other aspects of the network will be more interesting to observe, like block orphan rate and CPU memory usage

[johnyj]

Satoshi-dice was sort of the stress-test of it's day.  It was annoying, but ultimately I think it was one of the best things that happened for the system since it spurred a range of developments (code and otherwise.)  I said so at the time IIRC.  Overcoming that challenge gave me and I suspect other people more confidence in the system.

Spam from Satoshi-dice and other onchain gambling sites are easy to filter. Miners can easily change their code such that the transactions orginating or   going to their known address would effectively not be included in the block. However, the main problem with such stress test attacks is that the coins can be sent from different address and end up in different address. Without a huge amount of fees per transaction, they cannot cripple the entire system and it would be quite expensive. Currently, many attacks are just slowing down the confirmation timing for transactions with very low fees. The most viable way of stopping this kind of spam is to increase block size, thus increasing the cost for attackers to fill the block with spams.

A rich attacker can always fill the blocks with spams regardless of the cost, especially when he has other larger short positions opened on exchanges waiting for the panic to strike. Users must rely on much more hard measures to be sure that the system is robust against any kind of attack, not praying that some hedge fund don't strike like Soros

If we are using 8MB block right now, if the attacker successfully filled every blocks, then the problem is not only delayed confirmation, but the total chaos of the network: segmented nodes disagreeing with each other, confirmed transactions get cancelled due to the whole chain become orphaned 3 blocks later, double spends, many forks on different part of the network. In one word, no transaction can be reliable at all

[Searing]

 my view is the stress test will be a big 'yawn' ...some slowdown and much hype but by next week it will all be forgotten...for the amount of time etc spent on it for what it will show
it will again imho just be a big 'ho hum'

we will see in a week I guess

 

[boopy265420]

I am ready to face the upcoming stress test better way this time.I already removed my funds from blockchain temporary to not repeat the mistake I did last last.I just can hope this time can not achieve whatever they want to know from this stress test.They should check stress test once in two months if necessary not very often.